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Michael Pollan Talks Barbecue and Race (Video)

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Everyone's favorite omnivore Michael Pollan is back in the spotlight. This time around he's not talking about the merits of a plant-based diet. Instead, he's sharing his wealth of knowledge on the history of barbecue in this video from Big Think.

Pollan sheds light on how barbecue is a cooking technique so powerful it transcends race. ''When I was talking to historians of barbecue, and we now have historians of barbecue, they said that even during the tensest periods of racial strife, during the civil rights movement, if the good barbecue place in town was black, whites wanted to eat there and they would.''

Pollan discovered many more interesting barbecue facts while researching his most recent book Cooked: A Natural History of Transformation. Check out his three-minute barbecue lesson: